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Collective Bargaining Mba591Wk2

Collective Bargaining
Introduction
Collective bargaining is a good-faith process between an employer and the representative of the employees, usually a labor union, to negotiate wages, working hours, working conditions, and other matters of mutual interest (Business Dictionary, 2009). According to Byars & Rue (2004), the ideal end result of collective bargaining is that employer and union come to agreeable terms and conditions on these mutual interests and enter the terms and conditions into a written agreement, which will govern the daily administration of the working relationships between management and employees. The contract should also contain a clause that governs dispute resolution (p. 374).
This paper, by examining the role of the National Labor Relations Board, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Right-to-Work doctrine, the role of Human Resources, and five different industries including both unionized and non-unionized industry, provides an in-depth analysis of collective bargaining.
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an independent body of the federal government established in 1935 to oversee and enforce labor relations-related laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act to maintain fair labor practice both by labor union and employer. The primary goals of the NLRB are to ensure legal and ethical conducts of the labor union and the employer when handling labor issues, and to certify a labor union desired by majority of the employees in an organization (National Labor Relations Board, 2009).
Taft-Hartley Act
On June 23, 1947, the congress passed Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947 despite President Truman’s veto. The Act, co-sponsored by Senator Robert A. Taft, Sr. (Republican-Ohio) and House Representative Fred Hartley, Jr. (Republican-New Jersey), became known as the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act retained many characteristics of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, commonly known as the Wagner Act,...